pastry
Americannoun
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a sweet baked food made of dough, especially the shortened paste used for pie crust and the like.
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any item of food of which such dough forms an essential part, as a pie, tart, or napoleon.
noun
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a dough of flour, water, shortening, and sometimes other ingredients
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baked foods, such as tarts, made with this dough
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an individual cake or pastry pie
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of pastry
Explanation
A pastry is a sweet baked good. If you are into fruit tarts or chocolate eclairs, then you've got a thing for pastries. Most pastries start out as a soft dough or batter made from flour, sugar, eggs, milk, and butter. A tray of pastry at breakfast could include Danishes and croissants, while dessert pastries might be baklava, cream puffs, and strudel. All of these are variously flavored baked sweets, some formed from thin layers of flaky dough and others filled with fruit, cream, or other fillings. Another type of pastry is pie crust, a buttery dough that forms the base (and sometimes topping) for pies. Pastry originally meant "food made from paste," and paste meant "dough."
Vocabulary lists containing pastry
Stairway To Leaven: Baking Vocabulary
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Voilà: Croissant Lingo
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
“I wouldn’t eat Monday or Tuesday, then on Wednesday I could get a pastry, and then my shot would start to wear off around Saturday, so I usually got some calories on Saturday and Sunday.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 20, 2026
Refrigerate the muffin tin for 10 minutes, or until the pastry feels cold and firm.
From Salon ● Jul. 20, 2026
Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until the pastry borders are puffed and beginning to turn golden.
From Salon ● Jul. 20, 2026
Frozen puff pastry is wonderfully forgiving, provided you remember that butter prefers to stay cool.
From Salon ● Jul. 20, 2026
I take a savage bite of my pastry.
From "Merci Suárez Changes Gears" by Meg Medina
Carefully remove the ramekins and return the pastries to the oven just until the bottoms of the wells are firm enough to hold an egg.
From Salon ● Jul. 20, 2026
Refined carbohydrates include foods such as white bread, pastries, and many sugary products that have been stripped of much of their natural fiber and nutrients.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 18, 2026
Even if you are contributing £10 each for three members of staff, that costs the same as taking the family out for coffee and pastries, they pointed out.
From BBC ● Jul. 13, 2026
The company manufactures its own equipment to shape, bake and glaze the shiny pastries it sells across more than 40 countries, and relies on relatively few workers.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 6, 2026
Terrible ones who boil everything until it’s as gray and soggy as English weather, and the ones who bake perfectly iced cakes and adorable meat-filled pastries for BBC cooking shows.
From "A Place at the Table" by Saadia Faruqi and Laura Shovan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
